True disagreements are very hard to achieve. They are even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement. Taking it as an example, one might ask: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine and final relationship between finite minds? Are disagreements always only temporary steps toward final agreement? Must a community of disagreement always imply agreement, as in an agreement to disagree?In both engagement and disengagement with post-Heideggerian traditions of thought, What Is Talmud? redefines the place of the Talmud and its study in the intellectual map of the West. In Talmudic intellectual art, disagreement is a fundamental category, the ultimate condition of finite human existence or co-existence

Sergey Dolgopolski is an associate professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Jewish Thought and is the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). He holds a joint PhD in Jewish studies from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, and a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences. His general area of interest is in philosophy and literature. He is the author of What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (Fordham University Press, 2009), The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2012), and Other Others: The Political after the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2018).